Winter Vegetable Gratin

Hearty, warming and made with all of the best winter vegetables, this winter vegetable gratin is one of my favourite cold weather recipes. I’ve been craving baking trays filled with vegetables and warming sauces, spices, and carbs. Gratins are a favourite in our house, because frankly topping your food with breadcrumbs is always a good idea. Seasonal vegetables such as brussels sprouts, cabbage, and broccoli are honestly my favourite vegetables (alongside mushrooms), and this is a delicious way to cook them with reasonably low effort, and on a budget.

As a part of my budget series, this recipe comes out at £4.38 in total, making each portion 73p!

All you’ll need for this winter vegetable gratin is:

• 250g brussels sprouts, halved

• Half a small savoy cabbage, roughly chopped

• Small head of broccoli, cut into florets, and stalk chopped

• 50g vegan butter

• 8 cherry tomatoes, cut in half

• 2 tins of pinto beans, drained and rinsed (or any pulse can be substituted)

• 600ml oat milk (or any dairy-free milk you prefer)

• 2 heaped tbsp cornflour

• Salt & black pepper

• 1 tbsp wholegrain mustard

• 4 tbsp nutritional yeast

• 1 tsp paprika

• 1 tsp cayenne pepper

• 2 slices of bread, made into breadcrumbs (enough to sprinkle over top of dish)

First we’ll be blanching our vegetables by adding them to a pan, simmering, and then rinsing off with cold water. Set these aside ready for the gratin later.

Next we’ll be creating our vegan white sauce. There are many methods to this, but this is the method my mum has passed down to me because it’s just a bit simpler. You can mix the cornflour in the pan, and do things in a more traditional way, or the way you prefer – but I like to follow this method for ease.

First mix the cornflour with a bit of the milk in a small bowl, whisking together until it forms a smooth paste.

In a frying pan, melt the butter, and then add the rest of the milk and stir together. Heat this until almost boiling. Make sure it doesn’t actually boil, but instead keep an eye on the steam coming from the pan, and air pockets starting to come to the surface. This can take time when monitoring so it doesn’t boil, so be patient. Stir this occasionally so that nothing sticks.

Now we can add our cornflour mix. The key here is to stir continuously with a whisk so that you can create a thick and smooth white sauce. Keep at a medium heat throughout.

When you have reached the desired consistency for your white sauce, season with salt and pepper and stir in the mustard and half of the nutritional yeast.

Now we have our white sauce, we can add the blanched vegetables, pinto beans, and tomatoes to a large and shallow dish. Pour over the white sauce and mix this all through together.

Pinto beans are what I have chosen here, but you could swap this for black beans, kidney beans, green lentils, chickpeas, or basically any other legume that you have. If this becomes a recipe you like to recreate, then try switching the legumes and vegetables depending on the season for something different each time.

In a blender add the bread, nutritional yeast, paprika, cayenne pepper, salt and pepper. I like to keep ends of loaves of bread in my freezer to use for breadcrumbs, and also blend up bread that is going a little stale and put in a pouch in a freezer to use for recipes like this.

It’s a great practice to keep so that you can create a gratin dish easily midweek, or at the end of the week when you’re running low on food and have some vegetables to use up.

Sprinkle the gratin dish with the breadcrumb mixture and bake in the oven until golden brown, around 30 minutes.